The Center for Medical Simulation

For another highlight of our CMS Fellowship stories, we talked with Dr. Lia Cruz (DO, Pediatric Emergency Medicine). Dr. Cruz has sinced joined the Center for Medical Simulation as our Associate Director for the CMS-ALPS consulting team! Learn more about the CMS Fellowship program: https://harvardmedsim.org/simulation-fellowship-and-international-scholars-program/

How do we take care of ourselves in a way that allows us to bring the right leadership moves to the needs of the moment? : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Whether it’s an identity snarl or an identity tsunami, we have to be able to lift the grip of our anger and bitterness off of our internal steering wheel and get back to a place where our acti...

Instead of threats about the consequences of not staffing their clinics adequately during the holidays, a healthcare leader was persuaded to present the staffing goal as a challenge and ask for solutions from the team for how to get there: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Many of us think of leadership as a trait that you are born with, but resea...

Breaking eight ribs and puncturing a lung after hitting a tree in a downhill biking accident, Jenny got the coffin’s eye view of someone being completely flooded at the scene of an emergency: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Using Name-Claim-Aim as a crisis management strategy in the moment allowed the team to down-regulate their reactions and em...

Varying the narration that accompanies a situation can change the physiological way that learners experience it: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 How do we reset ourselves when people come at us with intense emotions? One of Jenny’s useful reframes for herself was: when someone argues with me, that’s a good thing. When someone cares enough about...

As we learn to manage, we have to acknowledge that defensive survival circuits are automatic, and produce immediate behavioral and physiological changes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 When we react, we know from the research that our management is not to prevent reactions, but rather what we do AFTER we react. We have to reset ourselves and re...

Little and big glitches both can knock you out of inhabiting your best self when you least expect it. Stress about her daughter’s upcoming wedding burst out in an unexpected way in Jenny’s morning huddle: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 What makes us bring up the fists and start fighting, or as Jenny puts is, releases her inner magpie when her j...

Interested in just the workouts? This week, we’ve assembled a package of 10 workouts to improve your team’s psych safety: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Hey friends! Jenny is off this week attending her daughter’s wedding, so we thought it was a great time to put together a special highlight reel of 10 focused workouts on psych safety. We hope...

Self-awareness of our stress level is the foundation of our ability to self-regulate, which is what allows us to notice what’s going on with others more accurately: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 What makes us feel safe and social? People’s lower brain stems have evolved to underweight positive experiences in the face of stress. When we feel hi...

Managing our own attention at critical moments is one of the key elements of self-leadership, allowing us to control our reactions and focus rather than being controlled by it: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Borrowing from Chris Voss’ idea of Tactical Empathy, Tactical Mindfulness is the idea that even if we don’t want to commit to a mindfulnes...

How do we help our colleagues push through initial effort to focus into a realm where they feel like they have achieved flow and are doing their best work? : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 A clear why, and a sense of working on problems that engage us, that matter to us, and that light us up, is the fuel or the wellspring of feeling like our jo...

“If I create too much psychological safety, won’t discussions just become endless? It sounds nice, but I have actual work to get done.” : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Psychological safety isn’t the opposite of discipline; it’s the partner of discipline. When we have to get things done, we have to get them done, but that doesn’t mean we can’t...

People are going to make mistakes. As the leader of a team, how do we help people move from the mindset of failure as a character flaw to seeing failure as a moment for growth?: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 How do we separate out the part of us that’s aware that mistakes are required from us for growth and the part that feels like we’ve done...

What should a leader do when they’ve encouraged their team to speak up, they’ve created psych safety, and then their team gives them feedback they didn’t really want to hear: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Whether and how we respond when people share their perspective with us has a big impact on whether they will do it again later. Pockets of c...

Teamwork isn’t free—our teammates are always making cost calculations about the benefits of weighing in versus the potential costs: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 One of the main reasons people will choose not to join in a workplace discussion is because they’ve sensed that the short term risk to themselves of speaking is greater than the long...

Emira Yusufova, Lucas Farris, and Julie Hartman join us again to talk their experience at asking questions where they truly don’t know the answer: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Lucas, Julie and Esmira discuss how to balance being the expert in a debriefing for a case you’ve run many times versus allowing the participants to surprise you, how s...

“There should be no more simulation programs. There should be READINESS programs.” Jenny Rudolph and Chris Roussin team up to show how simulation programs can make themselves essential to their larger organizations: https://harvardmedsim.org/blog/simulation-to-readiness-training-that-actually-translates This video podcast was originally presented as a keynote at SimGlobe 2026 in Bengaluru, India,...

n this special episode led by Mary Fey, Dr. Penni Watts, President of INACSL, joins us to discuss what we learned helping two nursing schools achieve INACSL endorsement, and how other nursing programs can get there! Listen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Watch: https://www.youtube.com/medicalsimulation What does high-quality simulation look lik...

Esmira Yusufova, RN, Lucas Ferris, RN, and Julie Hartman from the Society for Simulation in Healthcare’s Mindfulness Special Interest Group join us to reflect on their recent tries at the workout of the week: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 The Mindfulness Group chose to work on Curious Now #9, “What Are You Listening For?” about different liste...

“Walk me through what your work looks like,” is one of the most powerful questions a leader can ask: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 By understanding how each worker accomplishes the tasks that they’ve been assigned, we can often spot weaknesses in the system that would not be evident from an assessment of each role in the team on its own. Worko...

What does it mean when psych safety literature asks us to emphasize the purpose of the work as a leader? When we have psych safety, it can make the risks involved in making things better feel worth the effort: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 There are so many ordinary, even menial things we do every day, where if we can ferret out how they conne...

When Dr. Hannah Lawn returned home after completing a fellowship at Center for Medical Simulation, colleagues asked a simple question: How did the experience change you? “It’s changed my career,” she said. “I honestly feel like a different doctor since returning from my fellowship.” https://harvardmedsim.org/simulation-fellowship-and-international-scholars-program/

Moving our series on psych safety to the team level: how do we set expectations regarding things like reporting mistakes, managing uncertainty, or how we’re going to depend on one another? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 As a leader, we’re in charge of setting standards for issues like, whose voice gets heard in meetings? Who gets to decide when...

Psych Safety: Boundaries and the Cost of Growth | Curious Now 38 Why are we talking about boundaries in a series on psych safety? When we can’t hold consistent standards for ourselves and what we will tolerate, that unpredictability begins to undermine our team’s feelings of safety: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 As we start to change ourselves...

Where’s the line between requests and boundaries that we’re comfortable making, and ones that seem impossible to set? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 How do we recognize the trade-offs we are called to make when we are considering setting a boundary about what we will and won’t do? The reason we think about this in the context of psychological s...